Man admits sexual activity with a child - but avoids jail

[dutchman]

The pair met through online gaming



A man who ‘abducted’ a 14-year-old boy he had met through online gaming was caught after colleagues at the Nuneaton hotel where he worked saw a CCTV recording of him cuddling the youngster.

Scott Sumner pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to charges of child abduction, by taking the boy away from the care and control of his parents, and sexual activity with a child.

Sumner, 33, of Armson Road, Exhall, who also admitted downloading an indecent video of a child, was told by Judge Peter Cooke he had come ‘perilously close’ to being jailed.

But instead he was sentenced to 18 months in prison suspended for two years and was ordered to take part in a sex offender programme and a rehabilitation activity, and to register as a sex offender for ten years.

Sentencing Sumner, Judge Cooke told him: “I accept what’s said about the innocent way the two of you came into contact, it’s not a sinister grooming of the kind the courts often see.

“You are a gay man, that’s fine, but this is the same as a heterosexual man forming a relationship with a 14-year-old girl.

"The fact is, there was a sexual attraction.

“The messages you exchanged with your colleague show you realised how close to the line you were treading, and the two of you progressed to meeting. There was a degree of subterfuge.”

The judge said that what happened at the hotel was ‘at the bottom of the range of seriousness,’ and there was cause for optimism that Sumner had learned his lesson – but that he had come ‘perilously close’ to custody.